2 hours ago
1 ARTICLE AD
WALE AKINSELURE, during a journey from Lagos to Ibadan, discovered a father and son serving as driver and conductor respectively. He writes on the encounter with the unique duo, bearing in mind the typical driver-conductor relations on Nigerian roads
By the day, more Nigerians continue to embrace commercial road transportation as their newly found bride for movement from one place to another.
Nigerians particularly grew thirstier for a romance with commercial vehicles operators as petrol prices surged from below N200 in 2023 to over N1,000 in 2024. The last petrol price hike in October, from N998 to as high as N1,080, hit Nigerians like a thunderbolt, as it came not long after an earlier one.
Private car owners even writhe more in pains over the penetrating cost of fuelling their cars alone, which leaves them with virtually no disposable income at the end of each month.
As part of their coping mechanism, several private car owners now take out their cars only occasionally, subscribing mostly to commercial transportation for both their intra-state and inter-state movement.
As a result, the typical picture is that of corporately dressed persons jumping in and out of yellow Lagos commercial buses, popularly known as danfo, faragon and korope, as well as tricycles, popularly known as Keke Marwa.
Many commuting in commercial buses are at the mercy of the Almighty drivers and conductors.
While there typically may be a master-servant relationship between the driver and conductor, the bus conductor arguably does even more than the driver.
The conductor is the key person that the passengers relate with on any trip. The conductor is responsible for calling out destinations, collecting fares, managing passengers, and liaising with the driver. His voice has to be loud, and commanding, penetrating through the noisy city to be able to attract would-be passengers into the bus. The negotiation and collection of fares from passengers involves a mix of haggling, stern assertion, a blend of physical endurance, mental agility and street-smart intuition.
Usually with their back bent while standing for most trips, the bus conductor also waves his head left and right, keeping an eye on the driver, watching out to call bus stops, and being on the lookout to deal with law enforcement agents, park managers, various motor union officials, hoodlums, popularly known as ‘Area Boys’ among other challenges.
Conductors range from being no-nonsense to humorous. There are those versed in sharp verbal exchanges, always itching for a fight with passengers or men on their routes, who they deem uncooperative to their promptings.
Sometimes, altercations occur between the driver and his conductor, with passengers left to sit down and enjoy the drama. When the drama gets fiery between the driver and conductor, passengers sometimes intervene to separate them or call for help from street boys to end the fight.
Drivers who try operating without a conductor are quick to hire Area Boys as conductors. This is because they realise that the job of the conductor is herculean enough, let alone combining it with their driving task.
Typically, the driver and conductor are strange bedfellows brought together by the quest to make ends meet. Usually, the driver, who owns the bus, picks his conductor daily at a particular spot to set out for the day’s job.
Sometimes, the driver does not have a constant conductor and picks one of his regulars or anyone available for the day’s trip. As a result, it takes a while for trust to be built as one tries to outsmart the other in the money-making business.
The scenario, therefore, is that the driver, in his head, calculates the amount that he expects the conductor to deliver after several trips. Hell is sometimes let loose between the duo when the driver’s calculation is at great variance with what the conductor delivers.
For some, the sense of understanding is forged after months while others simply remain strange bedfellows, watching each other’s back on the job. There are conductors, especially those with facial marks, derived from regular lion-like fights with area boys and fee collectors, who assume the roles of bosses, dictating to the driver that they are in charge of the trip.
But, this driver and conductor, during a recent trip from Lagos to Ibadan, did not come across as strange bedfellows. What struck me first was their pointed noses, which were similar.
“Well, that is not unusual,” I told myself.
My curiosity was pricked when the bus stopped to pick up passengers at Magboro junction on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway in Ogun State.
Area Boys had swarmed around the bus to get their share of the four passengers picked, only for the conductor to signal that they should meet the driver.
This provided an opportunity to have a full glare of the face of the driver. Glancing to look at the face of the conductor struck a chord that these two looked alike.
Curious to know if this was a case of misreading the faces of the driver and conductor or not, I asked the conductor in Yoruba, who was close to me, and he responded with a wry smile, saying, “Egbon mi ni won (he is my brother).”
Alas! My guess was right. But I needed to know more about the relationship between the two. At that point, I knew I had to accompany the bus to the last bus stop in Ibadan, which I was told, was Iwo Road. When we got to the Toll-Gate bus stop, where I originally planned to alight, my colleague with whom I boarded the bus, wondered why I did not alight. I told him I was on a discovery mission and would follow this bus driver and conductor to the end of the journey. Well, my colleague wished me well.
After all the other passengers had alighted at Iwo Road, I told the driver that we needed to have a conversation at a less noisy place, which he obliged. He then drove to a Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation filling station on the Iwo-Road to Challenge route, where the conversation was held.
The first was to affirm if truly they were siblings. However, not long into the conversation, I discovered they were not siblings, as they gave contradictory facts. It was then I asked them to reveal if they were father and son, which they confessed to: father the driver, son the conductor!
Musa Ibrahim, in his 40s, was the driver, while the conductor, 19-year-old Basit Ibrahim, is his son. Musa Ibrahim has been an inter-state commercial driver, for over 20 years, plying Ibadan to Abuja route and then Ibadan to Lagos. He inherited commercial driving from his father. From driving across cities for many years, he has been able to build a house, change commercial buses and lead a comfortable life as a driver. He now does two Ibadan-Lagos trips, three or four times weekly.
Basit, the firstborn of Musa’s five children, dropped out of school in Senior Secondary School One, and constantly ran away from home at Amuloko, Ibadan for days, leaving his parents regularly searching for him. His reason for constantly throwing his parents into the trouble of looking for him was to be discovered after a probe by the parents. Tired of Basit’s usual escape from home, his parents sat him down, asked what he wanted to do in life, having abandoned schooling. Basit was emphatic, that all we wanted to become was a conductor and despised schooling or any other occupation.
Over the years, Basit’s father had simply picked up persons to serve as his conductor but this ended when his son declared that he only wanted to join his father as conductor on his Ibadan-Lagos trips.
“That is how he started going on travels with me. We had to get him engaged so that he stops running away from home,” Musa said.
“My son joined me as a conductor over two years ago.“
Affirming his dad’s assertion, Basit said, “Commercial transportation is my desire, not schooling. I stopped at SS1. I am not returning to school. All I want is to own my bus and also do inter-state commercial transportation. This is what I love and nothing more.
“I enjoy being a conductor and then becoming a driver of my bus afterwards. This is what I want to continue doing till I get married and have my own family and also have my children continue in this line. No matter what, this commercial transportation line is what I will toe, no thought of any other option.”
In the course of the job, Basit is a no-nonsense typical conductor. He recounted that he has had to engage in fisticuffs with ‘troublesome’ passengers, especially those who hesitated to pay their transport fares as demanded.
The camaraderie in communication between Musa and Basit is real. According to the father, he has had no cause to have altercations with his son in the course of carrying out his job as a conductor.
He said Basit was free to take from fares to buy whatever he wanted to eat while on the trip. According to him, even if Basit fails to be accountable when reporting money realised, he only occasionally subtly scolded him, but mostly allowed it to pass.
“We rarely have the usual driver-conductor imbroglio. Moreover, this is a father-son relationship. Such fights would be rampant if I were dealing with some stranger hired to work with me. There would have been issues of incomplete money delivered to me by my conductor. Of course, there are times when I lambast him for delivering incomplete money but it’s quick to be resolved considering that this is father-to-son relating,” Musa said.
This Basit affirmed, saying, “Of course, there are times that I take some money to buy things to eat while at work but my dad rarely complains about that.”
Knowing that he inherited driving from his father, Musa fears that his other children may want to toe the line of their elder brother.
However, he said he would do all he could to discourage this and would insist that they continued with schooling.
“If my remaining kids insist on being commercial transporters, I would not want that to happen; I would strongly oppose it. This is because my dad was also a commercial transporter, he handed it over to me, and my first son is toeing that same line. I think that is enough, my other children should get into other ventures.
“Beyond Basit being a conductor, he can also drive. So, I desire to get him his bus so he can operate his own as a driver alone. I presently only have this bus. I desire him to continue schooling but he has said he has had enough of schooling and wants to only be a conductor or else return to truancy. Most sons of fathers doing commercial transportation now have their buses and are now on their own,” he said.
Both Basit and Musa stated that apart from inhaling wanton exhaust smoke, they experience weakness in the body, but are quick to go to the hospital for treatment.
Asked if they sometimes take gin or other drinks, mainly in sachets and small bottles, to “shine their eyes” on the job, Musa said, “My son and I do not consume hard drinks at all.”
